Tuesday, August 14, 2007

I feel a bit like the turnips pictured above, sticky and slighly singed. It's about eleven hundred degrees out there. And a bit more in here. Last night I tried to make ice cream and it wouldn't freeze. Someone tell me about the housing situation on the North Pole, please?

If it weren't so infernally hot, I'd tell you about these glazed turnips, or turnip to be precise as I was feeding only myself on Saturday. But what can you do? Have some shots from Kauppatori (Salutorget) instead.

One end of the market is a tourist trap full of horrible T-shirts and reindeer hats (which reminds me to cook Rudolf soon, I think we have some in the freezer), and there's a food court where fried vendace (yum) battles paella (um), but the part closest to Esplanadi is a genuinely fabulous market with wonderful if fairly pricey produce.

None of this has anything to do with glazed turnips, except that I actually bought them there. Also chanterelles, but more on those later.

Melt the butter in a pan and add the turnip and just a splosh (like a tablespoon, tops) of water. Stir fry for just a minute or so until the turnip softens a bit. Add the sugar and a bit each of salt and pepper and stir until the sugar melts and goes all sticky. Mix in the chopped parsley before serving.

This boatful of potatoes (at least I'm assuming it started out full of potatoes, but I'm not a very early riser) didn't have anything to do with turnips either:

11 comments:

I think this is the market I remember (I remember their was paella and I also thought "um")! :) I loved the berries...so beautiful and so foreign to me! Can't wait to see what you do to those chanterelles :)

I love the berries too. Not unfamiliar to me but nevertheless, what a treasure to have them in reach like this! I just had a handfull of the most lovely, ripe, almoast sweet röda vinbär (red currant?) right from our neighbour´s bush (I have permission)... soooo good!

Just posted on Lucy's site (Nourish Me) about turnips. They confuse me! What we Scots call turnips you call lanttu, right? The orangey fleshed ones. But in England they call this a swede and call what I call a swede a turnip! And don't even get me started on rutabagas. What are they???

Alanna, I tend to use the Hakaniemi market more, because the food hall beside it has all the goodies (plus there's a bunch of ethnic groceries in the vicinity), but Kauppatori has the prettiest produce.

Joey, it's where the ferries to the zoo leave, if that helps you pinpoint things. I actually already disposed of the chanterelles a while ago (ugh, backlog), but I'm not sure I'll have time to post before I leave town tomorrow morning.

Ullis, I love red currants! We have some bushes in our garden, but the stupid birds got most of them while I was waiting for them to ripen properly - grr!

Alice, kiitos!

Wendy, I have no idea! For me, turnip = brassica rapa = nauris (looks like this, while rutabaga = Brassica napus napobrassica = lanttu. But they both have yellowish flesh, although there are also white-fleshed nauris/turnips, mostly early in the summer, and my head hurts just trying to sort these things out.

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A Note on Measurements

If I for some reason neglect to give out measurments in both metric and imperial units, Google is your friend and will ensure that you lose all ability to calculate conversions in your head. If you had any to begin with, that is, which I certainly didn't. Just type in [amount] [original units] in [desired unit] and hit search.
Furthermore, 1 dl = 100 ml.